Lessig on Government 2.0
Here is an interesting presentation from Lawrence Lessig on Government 2.0. It is the presentation he gave at the Cisco Public Services Summit in Stockholm in December.
Government 2.0 22 articles
Government 2.0 Club is live
http://www.government20club.org/ Government 2.0 Club is a national organization that brings together leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0.
Reflections on a Nobel Journey
Usually we see learning as moving from ignorance and uncertainty to knowledge and certainty, but sometimes the movement seems more in the opposite direction. One of the biggest gains for me from the recent Public Services Summit that Cisco hosted in Stockholm and Oslo was to raise questions and re-open issues. I have no doubt that we are at the start of a great period of change, but the difficult part is sorting out hype and dreams from the trends that will bring real change. Just when I thou...
Web 2.0 and the Public Sector
This is the version of the Government 2.0 paper that we used at the Public Services Summit in December. Its a slimmed down and improved version of the original draft. We plan to do a final version early in 2009. At the event the strongest push back was on transparency where there was a strong sense that the need for confidential advice put major limits on what could be achieved - I am not sure I buy that, but lets leave that to another day! Another interesting bit of feedback was the suggesti...
All together now?
A great article in The Weekend Australian reflects on the true potential of the Obama virtual campaign and its implications for the rebuilding of a public realm. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24635990-5010800,00.html Here's the potential.., Taken together, these are developments unprecedented in the course of Western democracy. Never before has a technology proved itself capable of replacing the town halls and city squares that, since the early democratic experim...
US Views on Government 2.0
David Weinberger has blogged on an interesting discussion about Government 2.0. What do people think? http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2008/09/19/irmc-government-20-and-beyond/
Mashing up public records
A collection of mostly DC centric "government mash ups" but the second commentor has already added some UK links. There are some interesting projects in there (and a few silly city guides that do not seem to fit the attention grabbing headline at all).
Incremental change isn't enough
Leading Canadian public servant Jocelyne Bourgon has written a powerful essay about the future of the public service with the misleadingly bland title "New directions in public administration" serving beyond the predictable". The paper, given at a conference in the UK in September, sketches 30 years of dramatic change in public administration to arrrive at this conclusion: New directions in public administration must also entail exploring 1) how to encourage innovation in government t...
The Connected Republic 2.0
This is the IBSG whitepaper Martin Stewart-Weeks and I wrote in the first half of 2007, setting out our vision for the public sector in a connected world. It updated the original Connected Republic paper to reflect the emergence of Web 2.0. I think it is wearing relatively well and thought it worth uploading given that it was the impulse that led to the creation of this site.
More good stuff from NZ
A couple of interesting blog entries from old colleagues downunder. First, this piece called Networked Citizens by Jason Ryan on the excellent NPSC blog looking at questions around government agencies allowing staff to use social networking tools. Second, this piece called Social networking, government social networking, or non-government government social networking by Matt Lane on the State Services Commission's In Devleopment blog pondering what the best approach to creating a social net...
Is public participation in democratic government really a good thing - or is the question moot?
Current circumstances are making for interesting times on the Web, as all sorts of new questions & views pop up about what is happening around us. Underlying this I see growing disillusionment and anger about the state of world affairs, and a rising tide of despair about the future. For me, interesting thoughts relevant to TCR are triggered. For example I have just read a piece by Larry A. Hickman published in Free Inquiry (the journal of the Council for Se...
A New Vision for the Welfare State
The UK public services design consultancy Participle have published a manifesto calling for an overhaul of the Welfare State. They called their vision Beveridge 4.0, a reference to the UK social reformer Sir William Beveridge, who in the 1940’s put forward a set of ideas that shaped the Welfare State. Beveridge wanted to tackle the five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness on the basis of co-operation between the state and the individual. He suggested that public ser...
What would radical change look like?
Like many of you, I spend a lot of time talking about public sector transformation, but what would radical change really look like? What would count as “Government 2.0”? Technology can certainly help governments become more efficient and it can make it much easier for citizens to access public services, but, while both those types of change are very important and can involve dramatic changes, neither is truly transformational. Renewing my car tax online is wonderful, but it is sim...
Ministerially-led, customer-driven Government Departments
A year ago the UK government created a new ministry called the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Its dynamic and progressive Permanent Secretary (Ian Watmore, previously the UK’s first Government CIO) wants the department to be innovation by name, innovation by nature and he is trying to drive this forward in terms of the slogan “Ministerially-led, customer-driven”. That set me thinking … In the private sector being customer-driven or customer-centric is easy to understand ...
Government 2.0 - an adventure in wiki-land
It's great to be able to announce that we are now ready to test the wiki facility on this site and see if we as a community can manage to collaborate on some thoughtleadership. Not surprisingly, we thought we would start with the topic of Government 2.0 and with a bit of help from Martin and Russell I have put together a series of seven principles as a starting point for the discussion. We are using Mediawiki - which is the same tool used for wikipedia and which takes a little bit of getting ...
Is the public sector ‘fit for purpose’?
A few years ago, the Australian Labor Party was led by a young man called Mark Latham. His accession to the Labor leadership was somewhat unexpected but fuelled by a reputation for original policy thinking and an eclectic curiosity (one of his political opponents was once unkind enough to label his approach "policy by Google"). Mark's leadership crashed badly in the 2004 election following which he abruptly left politics altogether. An iconoclastic writer and diarist, he's back in the mai...
Quick reality check (contd) - some wise counsel
From the 'Designing for Civil Society" discussion comes some salutary insights and wise advice from Tom Steinberg, MySociety founder and generally all-round smart thinker (and do-er) in the government 2.0 space. In a post to the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, Tom writes "mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it's basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in the wider field of gr...
Yes, but what about accountability?
We've been fortunate in the past couple of months to enjoy a double dose of David Weinberger. At the Nobel Public Services Summit in Stockholm and at the recent Cisco meeting in Orlando, the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and more recently "Everything is Miscellaneous" shared his views about the possibilities and pitfalls of the social web. My big interest in David's thesis of the semantic web is the impact on public policy and public management, of course. It strikes me we are witnessi...
Government 2.0 - a longer perspective
This was originally going to be a comment on Martin’s “An Intractable Challenge!” piece where he takes a look at some recent thoughts from Don Tapscott. However, it got a bit too long for a comment, so instead ended up here. As Martin notes, it is quite an understatement for Don to say that the idea of government 2.0 has profound implications for the public sector. He then points to the idea of an emerging “public purpose sector” as perhaps crystallising some of the change we are seeing or ...
Government 2.0 - Fad or Future?
Martin has already blogged on the specialist session we did recently on Government 2.0, but I thought people might be interested to hear some of the excellent debate for themselves. So we have now put short podcasts of the opening presentations on the public services summit event website. What was fascinating about the session (and the podcasts) is how each presenter approached the issue in their own way with a slightly different perspective on what the greatest potential benefits of Web 2.o...
Goodbye to Consumerism, hello to Produsage?
Australian academic Axel Bruns has just launched a website (soon to be followed by a book) where he celebrates the new era of “produsage” – the idea being that in certain collaborative communities “the creation of shared content takes place in a networked, participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge - frequently in a hybrid role of produser where us...
Government 2.0 - Two Cheers for the Romantics Part 2
We had a great discussion on the prospects and possibilities facing government from the growing impact of Web 2.0 tools and capabilities. These are just a few of the insights from the 3-hour discussion: In the end, the discussion about Web 2.0 and its impact on government was a discussion about redistributing power and authority and strengthening democracy. Radical change and deep structural reform would be slow and in some cases impossible. But anything that improved, even if incrementa...